Non-monetary social and network value: understanding the effects of non-paying customers in new media

Welcome to this Special Issue of the Journal of Strategic Marketing titled ‘Non-Monetary Social and Network Value: Understanding the Effects of Non-Paying Customers in New Media.’ The rationale for this Special Issue resides in the influential strategic shift, which is being observed from a conventional one-way paradigm, in which customers are viewed as relatively passive recipients of incoming marketing cues, to an increasingly two-way, interactive perspective, which recognises customers’ proactive, co-creative engagement, behaviours and relationships in crafting and co-creating their personal experiences with particular brands, products and organisations within broader social networks (Aaker, Fournier, & Brasel, 2004; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004; Brodie et al., 2011; Sawhney, Verona, & Prandelli, 2005). Within this evolving environment, firms are becoming increasingly focused on facilitating interactions, and building engagement, with key stakeholder groups, including consumers, consumer communities, public organisations and the general public (Bolton & Saxena-Iyer, 2009), thus resulting in complex sets of networked relationships influenced by each of the stakeholder groups involved (Mӧller & Wilson, 1995). However, while individuals’ interactive experiences and engagement within social networks may represent indirect revenue-generating opportunities they, typically, do not generate monetary value for firms directly. This Special Issue of the Journal of Strategic Marketing seeks to provide insight into the nature and dynamics typifying consumers’ non-monetary, social value generated within new media-based social networks, which remains extremely limited in the literature to date. The objectives of this Special Issue are to highlight the increasingly important role of non-paying customers to contemporary organisations, the specific dynamics characterising such individuals across different contexts, the ensuing implications of these developments for the development of marketing theory, and the identification of key opportunities and challenges arising from these dynamics for strategic marketing. In pursuing these objectives we present ten papers featuring authors from eight countries addressing a range of contemporary theoretical and managerial aspects relating to firm value as generated by non-paying customers. What constitutes a non-paying customer? While literature on this topic has remained sparse to date, we refer to a non-paying customer as a user of specific product(s) or service(s), which are offered for free, such that a mandate for the user’s financial payment to the firm does not exist, as it would in more traditional (i.e. paying customer) contexts. Examples of non-paying customer contexts include free email services (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo), search engines (e.g. Google, Bing), social media sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter), content marketing or the provision of free samples of products or services to consumers. As such, the emergence and rise of the Internet